Sands of Dune by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson
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Sands of Dune
By Brian Herbert & Kevin J. Anderson
Tor, 2022
Over the last twenty years, fantasy author Kevin Anderson has collaborated with Brian Herbert to produce nearly twenty novels and nearly a dozen short stories set in the continuity of the five Dune-related novels written by Brian Herbert’s father Frank Herbert. The latest such collaboration, Sands of Dune, is a small, slim volume containing four of those previously-uncollected stories. There’s “The Edge of a Crysknife,” which relates some of the back story of a minor character in Dune, “Blood of the Sardaukar,” which tells the story of one particular member of the galactic Emperor’s feared private army, the Sardaukar, “Imperial Court,” filling in a minor scene set a thousand years before the events of Dune, and “The Waters of Kanly,” in which Gurney Halleck, one of the scattered heroes of House Atreides who are beaten and scattered by House Harkonnen in Dune, is given an adventure set during the years of time unaccounted for in the gap between one section of the original novel and the next.
The book raises all kinds of questions. Some of them are practical and fleeting – why call it Sands of Dune when so much of the action in its stories takes place away from the desert planet Arrakis? And for that matter, why not collect all of those extant short stories, instead of just four? Why make the original hardcover edition a different size than any of Herbert and Anderson’s other “Dune” books? Why tempt the displeasure of the gods by having the gall to charge $26 for 155 pages of reprinted material? And so on.
Other questions are deeper and have been hovering around these Dune pastiche novels for two decades, the foremost being: why do this at all? Herbert and Anderson have answered this question for years by saying they’re thrilled to be telling the untold stories of Frank Herbert’s Dune world and giving fans of that world more of what they want.
But does it do that? Do any of these endless pastiches do that or even come close? It probably depends on what those fans want. In “Blood of the Sardaukar,” for instance, our authors give us the story of a man named Jopati, who was the scion of a minor imperial house until all of his kin were wiped out in what seemed to be a hostile move by House Atreides Duke Paulus. He’s inducted into the ranks of the Sardaukar and is in attendance on the Emperor Shaddam when the Atreides successor, Frank Herbert’s Duke Leto, announces that he’s decided to redress the crime and restore Jopati’s family to its ancestral home. At the climactic moment readers get this:
Into Shaddam’s stunned silence, Leto continued, “My father hammered into me the idea that honor is the most important thing in any man’s heart and mind. I don’t know why he was forced to accept the blame and the credit for what he did to House Kolona, but I intend to provide a righteous example if I ever have a son of my own. This is the honorable thing to do. If the Atreides cannot follow the course of honor, then my House is like a Guild ship without a Navigator.”
Does any Dune fan think this is what they want? Do any of them think this sounds even remotely like Duke Leto as he appears in Dune? Is there in this passage (or, fair warning, any other passage in this collection or in any of these collaborative pastiches) any even faint trace of the literary elegance and adroit compaction of Dune? This prose is lumbering, unimaginative, inert – and, most puzzling of all for a writing duo who’ve produced so many books, amateurish.
Or what about “The Waters of Kanly,” the story most likely to be of interest to those Dune fans, since it takes place during one of the lacunae in the first novel itself, the time between when Duke Leto’s trusted lieutenant Gurney Halleck fled the downfall of house Atreides and when he reunited with young Paul Atreides years later. Dune tells us that Halleck spent those years in the company of smugglers along with a small contingent of surviving Atreides men. Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson present a story in which Gurney plots to steal a water shipment intended for the brutish “Beast” Rabban on Arrakis. During the planning of this scheme (the details and nature of which are repeated literally a dozen times in virtually identical language), readers get this passage:
Gurney had led his own men into battle many times. They were well versed in Atreides code language, and would follow his orders instantly and efficiently. They understood his tactics instinctively, and never questioned an order in the slightest degree. He spent more of his time discussing the plan with Orbo and Staban’s men, all of whom gruffly acknowledged his instructions. They could smell profit and the adrenaline-rush of adventure. The thought of seizing an entire Harkonnen tanker filled with water destined for Rabban’s troops filled them with excitement and anticipation.
Leaving aside the rhetorical and grammatical problems (no comma is necessary in separating compound predicates, but it happens here twice in six sentences; two different things are “filled with” something in the final line; etc.), the prose line itself is so obviously padded for word count that you keep expecting to see “very, very, very” crop up. Halleck’s men will follow his orders “instantly and efficiently”? They don’t question his orders “in the slightest degree”?
Again, do fans really want this? Someone must want it, or these pastiche novels would have died a natural death back in Y2K. So maybe there’s a group of Dune fans who’ll buy anything that has familiar names, sand, or giant worms. There’s enough in Sands of Dune to satisfy that kind of trophy-hunting. But the fact that there’s absolutely nothing here to satisfy anybody else certainly hints at the possibility that every single one of these ghastly necropsies to appear is adulterating Frank Herbert’s legacy just a bit more.
-Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor. He’s a books columnist for the Bedford Times Press and the Books editor of Big Canoe News in Georgia, and his website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.